I enjoy your feedback, especially when my readers can point out something I may have missed. My thanks to both Shelley Podolny from H5 and Brandon Leatha from IDS for drawing my attention to the international standards giving an overview of the eDiscovery process that have been under development for some time. As you can see from the ISO.org page, the standards are still in the working draft stage. The full title is ISO/IEC CD 27050-1 and it has been put under the Security techniques (27050) classification. I remember the fanfare and discussion around this project back in 2013, but it had slipped from my radar without any subsequent public releases or project insight. At least this initiative is part of the established, formal international standards system. Even if this Part 1 standard does nothing more that codify definitions and re-affirm existing concepts, it will be a step in the right direction. Here is some draft introductory language that was so kindly provided to me:

One of my old clients asked my opinion on where she should spend her hard fought 2015 eDiscovery education budget while we were catching up at LTNY. A few minutes into the conversation and I realized that those talented marketing spin doctors had done a fabulous job of confusing consumers about the realities of eDiscovery certifications, standards bodies, continuing education and actual higher education courses. Since the arrival of the 2006 FRCP amendments, eDiscovery practitioners have struggled along without any governing standards body handing down practical methodologies, practices or any kind of formal educational path for neophytes to get up to speed. Most industries have non-profit 'Standards Developing Organizations' that bring together diverse process participants in a transparent, formal system to publish definitions and guidelines by consensus. In my opinion, provider product marketing has funded and driven the vast majority eDiscovery education that is available today. The Sedona Conference gives attorneys 10,000 foot level principals, but never intended to teach the litigation support tech how to process email from a PST. In 2005, a bright group of folks put together the Electronic Discovery Reference Model as a visual model of the typical workflow from that time period. Although I contributed to the subsequently formed EDRM working groups for many years, I was disappointed to read the notice at the bottom of the December EDRM Update:

Several year's ago, my friend Craig Ball put forth the Edna Challenge, a quintessential small matter with minimal ESI and a $1,000 budget. Earlier this week I posted a blog about SaaS providers and concluded with an opinion that the eDiscovery market is not friendly to smaller litigants, namely non-public companies and boutique firms without litigation support teams. One of the new providers that I called out stepped up to own the fact that they only cover a narrow slice of the discovery lifecycle. Escalate did not dodge my unfiltered take. Instead, they sent me a demo login and asked for my feedback, good and bad. Well here it is:

K&L Gates' summary of the opinion in United Corp. v. Tutu Park Ltd., No. ST-2001-CV-361, 2015 WL 457853 (V.I. Jan. 28, 2015) is worth a fast read. I believe that it constitutes continued confirmation that corporations are not expected to keep electronic files beyond a reasonable retention period. From the bang of Judge Sheindlin's gavel back in 2004, corporate counsel have hoarded every email, file and digital scrap in fear of spoliation sanctions. Up until two to three years ago, we saw few client counsel willing to approve expiry of any ESI, even when it was not specifically under legal hold. Now we are supporting 'defensible deletion' initiatives in most of our corporate engagements. The CIO pressure to consider migration from unstructured file shares to on-premise SharePoint, Office 365 or other cloud repositories offers an excellent opportunity for funding 'smart migrations' that clean up these digital landfills. Decisions like the Kmart case help bolster GC confidence that they can make common sense decisions and stop being a road block for good corporate information governance.

"Recommind Named to KMWorld's 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management."
Really? How does an eDiscovery SaaS provider matter to corporate knowledge management (Information Governance in the current colloquialism)? My impression has been that Recommind has completely refocused on chasing direct eDiscovery hosted review revenue. The sale of Decisiv email technology/team to NetDocuments in January certainly supports the market buzz that they had stopped investment in the IG market. My take is that this announcement speaks more to Recommind's long standing relationship with KMWorld than an active role in the IG market. My favorite quote:
"Recommind's inclusion the past twelve years conveys the company's unwavering industry leadership in eDiscovery and information governance through product innovation," said Hugh McKellar, Editor-in-Chief, KMWorld.

After more than a year, Rex Tomlinson lost his fight against leukemia on February 12, 2015. A rich lifetime of family, students and friends packed his memorial service and reception at the family home last week. Please join me in wishing Mikki Tomlinson and her family sympathy and condolences. Rex's obituary cannot convey the impact that his life had, but I wanted to share his philosophies of life:
• Know your terrain
• Pace yourself
• Timing is everything
"No whiney babies." - Rex "Wrecks" Tomlinson

As part of an interview request, I did a fast review of SaaS processing, hosting providers suitable for small firms looking for fixed price service. The market does not make this easy for you or for me to make sense of in the eDJ Matrix. The line between software, SaaS and professional services continues to blur as providers create web interfaces to upload/download ESI with hidden 3rd party tools and manual tech time behind the curtain. We originally differentiated between the traditional software and hosted service offerings with the assumption that the hosting providers were using a publicly available technology, example: Catalyst CR by Lighthouse eDiscovery listing indicates that Lighthouse manages/hosts the Catalyst CR platform. There are 115 eDJ Matrix SaaS technology offerings for the Small-Medium Business (SMB), but only 40 Managed Service SaaS offerings for the SMB. Frankly, this is because we only expanded the eDJ Matrix to cover service providers in our last year of analyst work. I started the eDJ Matrix to track and compare technologies many years ago and that is still the most mature data. Updating the Everlaw listing after my briefing last week was easy because they claimed to be free of 3rd party code. My check turned up two relatively new players in the SaaS eDiscovery market, Wind Legal and Escalate. Neither one gives enough hard information on their minimalist websites to confidently categorize them, but at least Wind discloses that they are a custom interface for Relativity.

I had one of those 'What the heck does this mean?' moments when I read my morning web feed. The headline is, "Electronic Discovery Leader Discovia Achieves 99/7% Accuracy Rate." Don't get me wrong, I am all about using metrics and measurements to improve process efficiency and quality. Discovia obviously has invested in automation, formal procedures and documentation (required for ISO 27001 certification). I see this kind of over-simplified marketing spin on metrics all the time since predictive coding (PC) became a selling point. Metrics and statistics can be used or abused to support many assertions. In the case of PC, I see providers using 'accuracy' to up-sell analytics without acknowledging the complex trade offs in precision and recall that impact the production size and composition. Attorneys have always known that if you want to produce 100% of the relevant collected documents, then forget relevance review and produce everything. Misunderstood or oversimplified metrics have become eDiscovery 'black magic' that reminds me of the early days when techno babble could be used to obfuscate human or process failures from a baffled bench. Getting back to translating this particular press release, let us look at the language:

When all else fails to get market traction, package your technology into a laptop-desktop-server form factor. That worked for Clearwell and clearly AccessData hopes that it will work for them. The old Summation did not need to be pre-installed or configured. But AD Summation is powered by MS SQL, not the old MS Access (Jet) database. Too be fair, the appliance is supported by a substantial chunk of training and support to help die-hard iBlaze users make the leap into modern eDiscovery technology. I get that an appliance tends to take the IT infrastructure arguments out of the picture, but that assumes that your IT group wants an exotic server in their data center or even has a physical data center any more. Nothing like finding a HP server sitting on a paralegal's desk when the client wants you to debug intermittent shut down issue. This happens with IT wants nothing to do with the new legal department solution. AD Summation checks almost all the requirement boxes for a corporate eDiscovery platform and the previously published pricing was very competitive. I just cannot recommend appliances because of all of the fire drills that I have been put through when neglected appliances hit their storage limits or otherwise have normal, expected server problems. They make great sense for global corporations with remote EU privacy reviews or government agencies who need a fire-and-forget solution for investigations.

Ever heard of them? I had not until they nicely persisted in trying to get on my schedule for LTNY. I was not able to accommodate them in New York, so we did a follow up briefing to get me up to speed. Everlaw unabashedly focuses tackling the traditional eDiscovery downstream from collections. They claim to be completely homegrown, but I have heard that too many times to give it credit for more than 'we are not reskinning a third party product'. They are one of the very few providers who acknowledge plaintiffs as a major part of their customer base. Plaintiff counsel needs good technology, but few have the budget to pay the market $/GB rates up front and most providers do not dabble in the contingency game for long. So how can cash strapped plaintiff firms afford Everlaw for matters like the Apple e-book antitrust matter or the GM ignition safety recall? With flat monthly pricing ranging from $20 down to $9 per GB, even David could process Goliath's production. I like seeing disruptive startups, even when I know that my service provider friends will feel the pain in their sale's quotas. It is good for the market. In my new-old leaner, meaner truth telling blog style, here are my take-away notes and some screen shots.

When I was wearing my 'analyst' hat, LTNY briefings with providers had a consistent level of marketing fluff and dancing around my questions while they did their best to get free market insight. Now wearing my consulting hat again, I filled my LTNY 2015 time arranging client meetings with potential providers for active initiatives. I did my best to proactively weed out sale's demos on autopilot by sending providers three key bullet points and limiting meetings to 30 minutes. Call it 'best intentions' while underestimating the seductive power of the temptation to spiel. I found myself making notes on what NOT to do while presenting to a prospect instead of my usual key take-away bullets. So here are some of my slightly tongue-in-cheek pointers. If we did a meeting in NY, just assume that I am talking about someone else for the sake of your ego.

I hope that you have managed to justify the time and cost to join the rest of our eDiscovery peers in chilly Manhattan. I got a couple notes from clients and friends flying yesterday or this morning saying that their flights were delayed, but so far my Houston to Newark hop shows on time. So what do you want or expect to gain from LTNY 2015? My clients are laser focused on short meetings with potential providers of services and technologies for short term projects. I have blown off my traditional ‘analyst briefings’ to support these meetings and keep the providers on target and off script. We have banned actual product demos at the show, as those can be done much more effectively onsite or via Webex. For every meeting, I have supplied a very narrow set of topics to make sure that the clients leave with enough information to include/exclude that provider when the projects hit the RFP stage. The years have disillusioned me with the value of canned ‘briefings’ where a senior exec delivers a scripted deck packed with feel good marketing bullet points. The best source of information is frequently other customers at the evening ‘social networking’ events. My goal this year is to connect new, old and future clients and peers together as possible. LTNY means many things to the eDiscovery world. Some consider it the industry’s largest job fair, with resumes hidden about every exhibit booth. Investors and cash flush companies see it as an opportunity to speed date potential acquisitions. eDiscovery marketing staff see LTNY as their annual ‘make or break’ for branding and splashy product releases. Whatever it means to you, make the most of it, stay warm and flag me down to say hello.

LTNY has become THE season for major product and pricing releases. My search bots and daily Google digests are blowing up with press releases ahead of the show. I doubt that Recommind’s divestiture of their Decisiv email analytics product/IP to NetDocuments caught the eye of most Axcelerate customers. So today’s big show stopping announcement leads with the headline:
“Recommind Adds Enterprise-Grade Business Intelligence to Industry-Leading eDiscovery Platform”

The eDiscovery market was founded on stories of rapid growth and big sales. Usually these kinds of stories come from mid-tier service providers who land a couple clients with those ‘bet the company’ matters that have unlimited budgets and incredibly short deadlines. Sudden growth spurts can stress small or young companies as they try to balance overwhelming demand against capacity. It is nice to see one of the earliest eDiscovery companies, Ipro Tech, announce record sales in 2014 based in both reseller subscriptions (service providers using their products) and direct software sales. Unlike a young startup or regional provider, Ipro has a mature infrastructure that has been selling imaging and eDiscovery tech for over 25 years. I know because my very first big consulting gig was a technology makeover of an energy company back in the early 1990’s. Jim King, Ipro’s founder, sold me on an Ipro 1.5 image management suite running on SCO Unix (yep, that long ago) with actual laser platters. What makes this revenue growth announcement interesting to me is that it appears to be based displacement technology sales to some very large and savvy providers; DTI, LSI and DOE Legal. At LTNY 2013, DTI’s CEO, John Davenport, briefed me on the increased performance and volume capacity from their conversion to Nuix for processing. Service providers can make fickle technology partners in a market with steadily falling commoditized volume pricing and massive virtual/cloud infrastructure that makes it relatively easy to switch brands behind the scenes. The national deployment of Eclipse SE (desktop version) by the U.S. Department of Justice is a feather in Ipro’s cap just in time for LTNY. Now the growth numbers:

This is a strange time in the eDiscovery/IG market. While the giant software companies seem to be spinning off or splitting up, I am starting to see successful niche players attract funding to acquire or develop broader targeted solutions. Symantec announced today that the standalone information management business will be called Veritas Technologies Corporation, resurrecting the venerable Veritas brand that was acquired in 2005. It will be interesting to see if the old/new Veritas management can create a development/sales culture more appropriate to the still nascent IG marketplace. On a personal note, Veritas acquired KVS’s Enterprise Vault back in August 2004 and I definitely recall the distinct cultural groups coming from the start-up, the data center and the security companies. Having just been recruited to bring in the corporate eDiscovery perspective, I did not really understand how different their product/sales approaches were at the time. Although I did not remain with Symantec long, I always valued the ‘Big Software’ product management experience and the amazing customers that broadened my perspective and inspired me to return to consulting as a problem solver. I never enjoyed the whole sales cycle, but I hope that this spin off will enable the newly minted Veritas reps to get back to selling value over portfolio.

Last year’s eDJ Cloud adoption survey confirmed that our ‘early adopter’ consulting clients were not the only ones piloting or actively migrating email and files to Office 365™ and Google Vault™. My early research and the new Office 365 Collection category of the eDJ Matrix only found 3-4 products that could connect to and collect from Office 365 mailboxes and SharePoint sites. A year later that same category now shows 14 products with O365 connectors. I expected the ‘big box’ tech players like IBM, Symantec and Xerox to lead the integration efforts because their archiving offerings already had cloud infrastructure on their roadmaps. The old school forensic players, Guidance and Access Data, had to support the law enforcement collection requirements, so they would be right behind or ahead of the big boys. You know that a data source has become a ‘requirement’ rather than an option when the mid tier cloud Saas players such as @ Legal Discovery add Gmail™ and O365 to their remote collection capabilities.

Exterro announced their new Legal Hold Foundation SaaS on-demand offering with 30/90 days free service for 1/5 year subscriptions. Phrases like “Issue Legal Holds within minutes of signing up” and a per matter cost “as low as $65 per hold” lead me to believe that Exterro has set up a relatively automated onboarding system for small-to-medium sized customers. Not that many years ago, there were only two options for a centralized enterprise class legal hold platform, Exterro and Atlas. Whether hosted or on-premise, these offerings required dedicated infrastructure and commanded price that put them out of reach on the SMB market. Launched in December of 2009 by Zapproved, Legal Hold Pro filled that void and was quickly copied by other providers. Recently, eDJ Group has seen global clients increasingly considering SaaS subscriptions in RFP engagements. With some or all of their key enterprise ESI moving to Microsoft’s Office 365, Google Docs or hosted virtual data centers, legal stakeholders seem to have lost some of their hesitancy of putting key discovery systems into the cloud. This Exterro offering let’s them compete down the customer size ladder and lowers the threshold for adoption, just in time for LTNY. Now let’s see what Zapproved announces for the show.

After the early letter of intent was announced last October, Microsoft today announced that it has acquired the small eDiscovery analytics company, Equivio. A couple perspective points to mull over. Equivio was the only analytics solution provider in my 2014 Analytics Adoption Report with clear IG case studies and formalized offerings for using machine learning to categorize unstructured data repositories. I found lots of providers who talked the talk, but only Equivio seemed committed to finding practical applications of their technology to tackle corporate ROT (redundant, outdated or trivial files). Office 365 adoption, migration and integrations seem to come up in every 2014 eDJ strategic consulting engagement. The acquisition announcement was made by Rajesh Jha, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Outlook and Office 365. That tells me that Microsoft wants to add Equivio workflow and analytics to the new SharePoint eDiscovery Center. If Microsoft follows their normal adoption strategy, Office 365 customers may get the early Equivio functionality for NO cost for a time period. This is definitely a shot across the bow of the eDiscovery provider armada. My last point is the purchase price. Microsoft is not disclosing the final number, but the Wall Street Journal originally reported a possible $200 million offer and subsequent reports have the number in the $150-200 million range according to Venturebeat.com. If you give Hoovers or Owler revenue estimates any weight (and that is always tricky with privately owned companies), Equivio could have just pulled off a 15x or greater multiple. This kind of profit may finally inspire the venture funds to get off the fence and put real money into this market for players who have a compelling IG-eDiscovery solution story.

Every Monday night, almost the weekly eDJ digest fires out to roughly 6,000 members. I expect to clean out 2-10 dead email addresses every Tuesday morning, not a bad rate for such a volatile industry. Occasionally I get a burst of dead addresses from a single company, which I interpret as a potential indicator of layoffs, downsizing or other M&A activity. As our industry increasingly uses analytics to spot changes in trends, chronological email gaps and other indirect evidence, we should remember the hard lessons learned by criminal prosecutors who have relied entirely on circumstantial evidence and inference. While bursts of bad addresses have previously enabled me spot layoffs by Recommind, I could not find anything on the web to explain the eight email addresses from DTIGlobal.com that went bad in the last week. Maybe their email administrator finally killed off inactive accounts or they migrated to Office 365 (like most of my corporate clients) over the holiday weekend. It definitely got me thinking about how our focus on analytics, trend spotting and indirect evidence can lead us down the wrong path if we do not validate leads with hard, direct evidence.

When the bench has had enough discovery bickering from the parties, it can ‘divide the baby’ and impose it’s own discovery plan. In the case of Armstrong Pump, Inc. v. Hartman, No. 10-CV-446S, 2014 WL 6908867 (W.D.N.Y. Dec. 9, 2014), the court appears to have lost patience with both parties and decided that a set of 13 search terms run on ALL of the Plaintiff’s corporate ESI will retrieve actual responsive content. I have served as an expert and defense strategist in too many cases to pretend that anyone outside of the matter can actually determine whether these terms will be effective. So my perspective on the case should be taken as a more general commentary than a professional, informed opinion on this specific case. The K&L summary is a fast read and has a couple interesting points.